Montgomery County, Maryland, is just north of Washington, D.C., one of the most affluent counties in the United States, and an ideal place to live. With an average homicide rate in the county of only 25 per year, Montgomery County was safe, and not the sort of place where a drive-by shooting would occur. Yet, in October, 2002, that was about to change.

It had been barely a year since the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, and those who lived in and around Washington, D.C. were still nervous about future terrorist action.

On Wednesday, October 2, 2002, around 5:20 p.m., someone took a shot at a Michael’s Craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. The rifle bullet drilled a hole through the window, leaving minimal damage, but no one was hurt.

Just over an hour later, another shooting occurred, this time at the Glenmont Shopping Center at the junction of Randolph Road and Georgia Avenue. James Martin, a 55-year-old programs analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was doing some grocery shopping at the Shoppers Food Warehouse, buying food for his church’s youth group, before he headed home to his wife and 11-year- old son.

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With the purpose of writing about true crime in an authoritative, fact-based manner, veteran journalists J. J. Maloney and J. Patrick O’Connor launched Crime Magazine in November of 1998.

Their goal was to cover all aspects of true crime: from organized crime to serial killers, from capital punishment to prisons, from historical crimes to celebrity crime, from assassinations to government corruption, from justice issues to innocent cases, from crime films to books about crime. Read More